Bibliothek Stuttgart with Woman

In this photograph, Bernhard Hartmann decided to give a completely different impression than in his first representations of the Stuttgart Public Library. By including a reader in the lower left-hand side of the photograph, Bernhard Hartmann underlines the human dimension of the seemingly cold and futuristic Stuttgart Library. The calm and isolation of the interior space makes it easy for her to focus on her reading. This is a detail that has its own importance in the way in which the photograph acts on the viewer. The architects, Eun Young Yi, seem to have designed this masterpiece for people's well being and in respect of their needs.

Born in Frankfurt in 1955, Bernhard Hartmann began his artistic career at the age of 18 as a press photographer for a German newspaper. Self-taught, he studied art and became a landscape photographer after discovering this medium with the aid of his parents? Polaroid. He creates dramatic and cinemascopic images that are often compared to the Romantic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, but also to the dramatic natural scenes by English painter William Turner. He prefers to photograph places where the arts are practised and expressed and thus presents series on operas, theatres, or European manors. A lawyer in Munich, Bernard Hartmann now lives near Lake Starnberg in the Bavarian Alps. His works belong to numerous private collections and have been shown in the United States, Spain, Italy, and Germany. He was elected ?Photographer of the Year? by a Swiss magazine and won the ?American Black-and-White Photo Awards? as well as the ?Panoramic Epson Award?.